On Thursday of the 2022 Food Safety Summit, a morning education session examined how to build an individualized blueprint for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tech-enabled traceability. Mark Moorman, Director of the Office of Food Safety for the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) at FDA, and Andrew Kennedy, New Era Technology Team Leader at the FDA Office of Food Policy and Response (OFPR), discussed how to advance traceability to help protect consumers from contaminated food, voluntary adoption of tracing technologies, and ways to harmonize tracing activities.
The concept behind of the Blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food Safety is to be "a modern approach for modern times" led by people, based on the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), and enabled by technology. New Era's Core Element 1—Tech-Enabled Traceability—will require "getting out of [Washington D.C.] and finding new partners and working together," said Mr. Moorman. "It's going to require FDA to get comfortable with asking, 'what if?' questions."